[78] The disposition to suicide may be manifested very early in life. M. Falret knew a boy, twelve years old, who hanged himself because he was only twelfth in his class. A similar case occurred at the Westminster school about seventeen years ago. Harriet Cooper, of Huden Hill, Rowly-Regis, aged ten years and two months, upon being reproved for a trifling fault, went upstairs, after exhibiting symptoms of grief by sighing and sobbing, and hung herself with a pair of cotton braces from the rail of a tent bed. A girl named Green, eleven years old, drowned herself in the New River, from the fear of correction for a trifling fault. Dr. Schlegel states, on the authority of Casper, that in Berlin, between the years 1812 and 1821, no less than thirty-one children, of twelve years of age and under, committed suicide, either because they were tired of existence or had suffered some trifling chastisement.
[79] “Oh, supreme God, who inhabitest the highest heavens, heal my afflictions; as with the wretched in hell, the joyful in heaven, shew mercy to the guilty.”
[80] Dr. Moore’s Travels through France, vol. i. let. 32.
[81] Hufeland’s Journal.
[82] Hist. de l’Acad. Roy., 1769.
[83] Paris and the Parisians, by Mrs. Trollope.
[84] Voltaire observes, that if Creech had been translating Ovid, he would not have committed suicide.
[85] We refer our readers, for a minute and deeply interesting account of this unfortunate woman’s career, to a work from which we have gleaned the above facts; the particulars of her life will be perused with great interest.—Videi> “Memoirs of Mirabeau, by himself,” vol. iii. chap. xi.
[86] Vide Frontispiece.
[87] A singular case of this kind was brought under the notice of the Westminster Medical Society by Dr. Stone, as an argument in favour of the possibility of a person committing suicide when in possession of a sane mind.